That it does. Never had a false positive in over two years.
Not only does the spam filter rock, but I find it irresistably amusing that the spam folder always has a link to a spam recipe at the top, and that when I trash the messages it says “Hooray, no spam here!” That’s just comedy!
I’ve given up on my Yahoo accounts, except for the crap one that I use on spammy sites for registration purposes. Gmail is just so much cooler. I can archive a conversation (I like a spartan inbox as well) and if someone happens to reply to that series of messages the whole thing pops out of archive and back into the inbox, so I know what the hell they’re replying to. I like it that I can set up gmail to send messages as though they were from my other accounts–very handy. Then there’s the fact that it’s POP3 enabled without having to spend money–I don’t know if Yahoo has changed that, but they used to want twenty bucks a year for POP3 access, to which I say fuckem… The contacts handling is very smooth and seamless as well, and I like the integrated IM feature as well, since most of my friends have gmail as well. Can I also get a “hell’s yeah!” for the fact that there isn’t one single annoying flashing banner ad in my gmail account?
Oh, and the gmail skin extension for Firefox is very spiffy as well.
Gmail doesn’t use folders to organize your messages, but you can organize them. Folders limit you to one single overarching category for that message; using labels you can give a message several categories (look under more actions > new label to create labels and apply them). To empty your inbox, just select everything and click ‘archive’. Nothing is lost, just moved to the archive. Click ‘all mail’ to see all the mail you’ve ever received, or search to find all mail with a particular label. You can also use stars as a quick way to mark important items to retrieve later.
Gmail is great, can’t say enough good things about it. Always learning something new, in fact yesterday, I had an email for an appointment, thought hey, I’ll put it on my calendar (Trying to transition to an online calendar instead of paper, you would not believe what I have to keep track of, my paper one is in 15 minute increments, like a Dr’s., and it’s frickin’ full,) and as I was opening up gmail calendar, thought wouldn’t it be cool if it’d automatically just put it in calendar? Well, lo and behold, on my gmail on the right side, it asked me if I wanted to do just that. Cool. Intuitive.
Homo Ergaster, don’t think of folders anymore, think of keywords instead. I, too, hate a full inbox. But wondering how to find all those emails for a purchase in case there’s a problem? Just type in the sellers name. Or that one subcontractor for that one project? Type in the Sub’s name, or the project name. If it’s anywhere in the email, it’ll pull it up, negating any need for folders.
The storage capacity is very handy.
I use POP to access my gmail, and I run into a strange problem. If I open gmail in my browser and send an email that way, my email also gets sent to my POP account. I don’t want a copy sent to me. Anyone ever run into this problem?
Hmm. I looked this term up. It does appear to be similar to what I’m talking about, but the definitions I found were all about large design or construction projects, not consumer products and their interaction with end users. Whatever the name for it, I feel like the urge to make everything unnecessarily complicated and call it “better” is so much more common than it used to be.
As for gmail, it looks like half the posters here have drunk the Kool-Aid.I’m not sure what the hell everyone else use their e-mail for, but I’m not intereste in holding chats with people and then reliving them. Even if I were, that’s what IM programs are for. gmail seems to be a failed attempt to combine the two. What I want is to be able to find a specific e-mail that contains specific information. But with gmail I can’t do that, because everything is listed as part of a “conversation” (how that term in this context pisses me off!) of e-mails whose only commonality is their authors hit “reply” to an original message from me to write me back about something wholly unrelated.
I doubt that was ever the intended purpose, as supported by the existance of Gtalk, a dedicated IM program.
I actually really like the “conversation” festure of Gmail; it makes it so much easier to keep track the back-and-forth nature of email.
Perhaps I am overly dense today, but try to find it using the search feature at the top. Recall as many parts of the email to help you find it. The specific phrase, the sender, the topic. Use it like a search function. Or am I not understanding you correctly?
Use the highlighter function as well, to scan through the specific email.
I love my gmail accounts. Using Outlook at work feels positively archaic now.
Dude, this is Google. That’s what “Search Mail” is for.
Hey, me too. I remember asking her one day what she thought of it, because I noticed she used it, and she raved, recommended and invited me.
I love the archival feature, the HUGE storage, being able to search, synch things to my calendar, all of it. Other e-mail programs seem like riding a tricycle after using this.
At my school and the work places of several of my friends IM programs are banned. Since the gmail chat program is in the browser, I don’t need to download anything which means I can chat with my friends while in class. Unfortunately, some places have already caught on and banned the access of gmail at work.
I’m planning a camping trip with about 20 friends. Gmail makes the process go so much more smoothly. It’s also perfect when planning what gifts to give my parents with my 8 siblings. I also use it to communicate with my boss about projects. Since all the conversations are together, I can easily flip through them to find old information.
Does anyone else use google talk? I love the thing, it’s the best program I’ve found for trading files. It has no limits on file sizes so if my friends are willing to wait, I can send them stuff that’s several gigs.
I also use google desktop. I have a todo list, a scratch pad for random notes (no more post-its everywhere!), a calender I can keep track of my bills and important dates with, a system monitor, a weather device that tells me the temps where all my family members live, and a news tag that alerts me to the latest stories.
Oddly enough, I hated all of these applications when I first came across them. I uninstalled google desktop from the two computers it came with before reinstalling later after observing how friends used it.
Thanks to Avumede, XJETGIRLX, dahfisheroo,I’m a happy man with a clean inbox.
Now I now what that “Archive” thing meant.
No, we just recognise what the features are for, and find them useful. It doesn’t have to be “chat” for it to be helpful for correspondences to be collected together. If I have an ongoing dialogue with someone, be it over the course of half an hour or three weeks, it’s awfully handy to have it all come up in one place so I can refer back. Maybe nobody ever writes back to you; I dunno. I write to people about a subject, and they write back. Gmail organises things according to that subject; I am pleased. I can’t begin to imagine how this could annoy me.
If they change the subject line (y’know, so it perhaps holds some relevance to the content of their email), it’ll get grouped as a different “conversation”. And if you search for a keyword you’re interested in, you get all the conversations containing that keyword. You’ll even get relevant snippets next to the subject lines, and when you click in to the conversation it’ll even highlight the keyword whenever it appears. What’s the problem with that? Hell, have you ever tried searching for something in Outlook (or for that matter, most desktop email apps)? It’s atrocious. The only sensible way is to get Google Desktop Search and let that index your email, which is pretty telling.
The problem here is that you have found a tool that does something different to what you’re used to that happens not to fit your usage patterns. And? It doesn’t mean the tool is crap, or that other people have drunk the kool-aid if they’re actually capable of using it. Use something else, for crying out loud.
Feature creep (or creeping featurism) is a somewhat common term in computing, as well.
I know that it may not be useful to organize emails in the manner that gmail does, but it was and continues to be useful to me for several reasons. 1. When I was in school, I was doing in depth research projects that required several emails back and forth with professors for meetings and brainstorming. If I didn’t have all those emails connected in a chain [and especially linked together to form context], it would have been a literal nightmare to try and keep track of all that was going on. 2. I do occasionally have long conversations with friends via email that are also important to link together. 3. A lot of the gmail features that aren’t available in other web-based email services are useful to me. Tags help me to sort my emails properly, which is a must with my grad school applications, and it’s handy to have a calendar tied to the email service that I can check at any computer that has internet access. (I have a planner that’s paper-based, but sometimes it runs out of room. It’s better for deadlines and assignments, but not so great for scheduling social stuff.) 4. I don’t get ridiculous amounts of spam in my inbox anymore, or the email service assuming that, since I have an unusual name, anyone else with an unsual name is someone I actually communicate with. (Somehow most of my spam is either for penis enlargement [uhm, I’m a girl] or from spambots with stereotypically “black” names.)
I tend toward being overly organized, so these features are nice and make my life easier. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up with technology, but I haven’t had any issues adapting to the features in gmail.
Gmail has the hooks for POP and SMTP, so you can use it with whatever client floats yer boat. Load the a portable version of the client on a USB thumb drive, and you can use it on any machine, just like the web interface.
jsgoddess, That is a feature that gives you a record of the email you sent via the web interface on/in your POP/SMTP client. Otherwise you would not have access to that from the POP/SMTP client.
Which is actually what I would prefer. But I couldn’t find a way to turn it off, so I’m assuming that it isn’t what everyone else would prefer. Oh well.
You can set up a rule in most pop clients to send “mail sent by me” to the “sent mail” folder and when gmail sends you your copy it goes straight to your sent mail folder on your local machine. Or you can set it up to delete the mail when you download it.
Enjoy,
Steven
Gmail is the best damn email that I’ve ever been given or paid for.
It works seamlessly in Outlook 99% of the time, and when I’m searching for something from way back in the day, it takes five seconds to load up Gmail in Firfox and search for everything instantly.